Sheila Bair

Reuters has a delightful story today about Wells Fargo’s merchant banking business, Norwest Equity Partners, which owns among other things the quite horribly named rifle maker Savage Sports. I can’t get too worked up about the likelihood that a fifty-year-old, smallish ($3.7bn), carefully managed, moderately gun-toting, otherwise wholesome private equity business will bring down the […]

As you may have heard, earlier today, Citigroup announced that CEO Vikram Pandit would be resigning from his post at the bank, effective immediately, along with several longtime lieutenants. While the news came as a shock to Wall Street, it was assumed that on the inside, employees had been given some advanced warning and time to get used to the idea of life without Uncle Vik. That he hadn’t just left in the middle of the night. That those hugs on the elevator Monday hadn’t been their last. That he’d stashed something away for them to remember him by. A good-bye note. A glossy 8X10 photo to keep on their desks. SOMETHING. Apparently though, not so much.

The news of Mr. Pandit’s departure after five years atop the company came as a shock to Citigroup employees, including senior executives. In the firm’s London office, some executives emerged from a meeting and read the news on their computers and Bloomberg terminals, well before the bank’s internal memo was released. Soon a dozen employees were crowded in front of television monitors, following the story on financial business shows. Others were seen around a water cooler on the trading floor, discussing the news. Still others retreated to their desks to parse Citigroup’s recent earnings release, looking for hints of internal conflict. “There’s shock,” said a Citigroup executive based in New York. “Even senior people were surprised.”

And while early reports suggested that Count Vikula had simply decided that Citigroup had come so far since he’d taken the gig five years ago that his work was done, and that while it was time to move onto the next stage of his life, he’d cherish the memories and the people he met at Citi, it now sounds like the split was a bit more acrimonious than that.

Pandit abruptly stepped down following a clash with the New York company’s board over strategy and operating performance at businesses including its institutional clients group, according to people with knowledge of the bank.

At this time, some questions that need answering:

* Does today’s news change Meredith Whitney’s opinion of the Big C, which, as of last April was that the thought of it still sickened her?

* Where is the comment from Prince Alwaleed, AKA Citi’s largest individual shareholder and Vikram’s number onefan?

The ladies who serve and prepare the food at Currier House all have crushes on senior Mike Corbat. The woman who checks off the names–the one sitting at the desk–smiles and winks at him. Then the greyish, plump one who serves the french onion dip giggles, when Corbat quips something that’s not-so-funny. And during lunch, a man who also works in the dining room–he’s the aged guy, with a slightly arched back who stands around in his red coat–comes over to Corbat and gives him some present all wrapped up in tinfoil. The guy in the red coat paternally pats him on the shoulder and walks away. “I just give them tickets to some of the games,” he explains. You see, Mike Corbat is a 6-ft, 3-m, 230 pound dear. Whatever the case. Corbat–an all-Ivy offensive guard on the Harvard football team–may be a dear to the people who work in the dining hall, but he certainly isn’t dear to his opponents. People who are dears on the field don’t get contacted by at least a half-dozen teams informing him of the possibilities of his playing in the National Football League.

* Could all of this have been different if those cheap fucks has just given him his Zen Garden?

Sheila Bair, who served as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp during the crisis and its aftermath, levelled fresh attacks at Mr Geithner, the Obama administration, fellow financial regulators and bankers such as Vikram Pandit, Citi’s chief executive, in a new book that has laid bare policy disagreements of the past few years…Ms Bair […]

Being in certain rooms at certain times seems to be a good predictor of selling a book. Bin Laden’s bedroom on the night of his death is an obvious one, and various days in the Oval Office have or may soon have their chroniclers, though the world still awaits the unabridged memoirs of the guy […]

There are so many good stories in Jesse Eisinger’s piece in ProPublica about how the Fed let banks return capital to shareholders that they somewhat obscure the central non-story: In early November 2010, as the Federal Reserve began to weigh whether the nation’s biggest financial firms were healthy enough to return money to their shareholders, […]

Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC and cartoon-klutz-villain of Too Big to Fail, comes in for the occasional gentle ribbing on Wall Street, and her column in Fortune today is well set up for another round of gentle ribbing, which I will get to in just a minute, so you might think that that […]

Sheila Bair continues to be mad that she didn’t get to sit at the grown-ups’ table during the financial crisis, and she told Joe Nocera all about it in his much-talked-about “exit interview” this weekend. She-Bair is not afraid to bring the awkies regarding her relationship with Hank Paulson: “Except for a 10-second handshake, she […]

“Tim was organized and low-key, although given to occasional bursts of profanity and odd fits of giggling,” claims Steve Rattner in his new autobiography, which he also writes that JPMorgan vice-Chairman Jimmy Lee is something of a “crybaby” and describes Sheila Bair as a “small, trim woman about my age with brown hair, brown eyes, […]

Emails between the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC over the issue of who can do what with regards to Washington Mutual in 2008 are particularly fierce. Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee investigating the collapse of WaMu, called it a “turf battle.” At the Senate hearing today, John Reich, former director of OTS, […]

SheBair is oddly pulling a Geithner, flip flopping around the prop trading ban proposal. Just like her nemesis, she’s adopting a “yeah, it’s a great idea but I don’t know” attitude toward Obama’s proposal. At Wednesday’s AIG hearing, Congressman McHenry asked Timmy G. how he could back the Volcker Rule while having said that he […]

How do you limit executive compensation without politically difficult limits? Don’t use limits, of course. Thanks SheBair! We were worried there for a minute! Banking agencies should become more active in setting compensation standards that are “principles-based” without setting specific amounts for pay, Bair said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Washington. How […]

That the United States would be more than fleetingly conflicted about the role of capitalism in saving capitalism might be surprising- in any other age. Today, we can only shake our heads watching the government publicly disembowel the “money men” before, nearly in the same breath, pleading with them to jump in and fulfill their […]

We are all for simple explanations to complex financial problems. Given this, what prerequisite for a major regulatory position in finance could be more gratifying than the ability to explain complex monetary policy issues to children? And given this, who could be more qualified than Sheila C. Bair, Chairman of the Federal Depository Insurance Corporation, […]

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Oct 1, 2008 at 10:24 AM

SAC

Mary Jo White was the top federal prosecutor in New York City during Bill Bratton’s first run as the Big Apple’s top cop, and she learned a few lessons from his “broken windows” theory: Clean a place up a little, and throw the fucking book at the street urchins who are messing things up with […]